Trivia / Ganbare Goemon 3 Shishijurokube No Karakuri Manji Gatame

• Development Gag: The game itself makes it painfully clear to the audience that its production was troubled and that it is missing entire stages. A whopping 3 final key items are given at once by a simple Chain of Deals. Yae skips the final stage with her "feminine intuition". The titular "Mecha Leg Hold" of the Big Bad is comically denied from being used.
• Fan Translation: A particularly late-breaking one. Due to difficulties in cracking the compression Konami used for the text of the Goemon series, a proper fan translation for Goemon 3 was not released until February 2020, just over 25 years after the game was first released.
• Follow the Leader: The game very clearly patterns itself off the immensely successful The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, from the continuous 2D overworld to the presence of "heart containers" in the form of the silver cats to the pseudo-Dark World in the form of Neo Oedo. Only when you enter a dungeon does the game revert to its 2D platformer roots. The next game in the series before the shift to 3D would abandon this approach and return to the classic gameplay/level select style seen in Ganbare Goemon 2.
• No Export for You: Like all of the other Super Famicom Goemon games aside from the first, this game never saw release outside of Japan.
• Troubled Production: There is strong evidence that this game had a rushed development cycle leading to numerous features being cut late in production. Several of the dungeons, including the final dungeon, have only a couple of rooms and maybe one or two puzzles in them, while others are sprawling labyrinths; half of your character weapons never get upgrades; and, most tellingly, three of the eight MacGuffin collectables that you're supposed to get from the end of dungeons are simply given to you at the end of a short Chain of Deals sidequest.
  • There is a developer interview where producers Madoka Yamauchi and Etsunobu Ebisu remininsce about the game's creation, revealing its bloated scope was a result of the previous game being considered too short by audiences.
    Ebisu: We’d gotten comments like Goemon 2 [Ganbare Goemon 2 Kiteretsu Shogun McGuinness] was lacking in content, so we decided to make a game that gave people more gameplay time by deepening the adventure aspects of the game. But no matter how long we worked on it, the end was never in sight.
    Yamauchi: That design document was so incredibly thick. Without noticing, suddenly someone would add more features to it.
    Ebisu: Wasn’t it you guys who made it that thick to begin with? When the design document was put on my desk, the whole thing was stacked higher than my computer monitor! I was terrified when I saw that.
• What Could Have Been: Design materials show that Jurokube is meant to pop a manji on his forehead anytime he's "thinking of something stupid", but it didn't make it into the actual game. He does comically pose like the symbol on defeat, though.